The Visiting Forces Act and the Anglo-Canadian Command Relationship: The Unhappy Case of British Guiana, 1942–44

During the Second World War, Canadian interests in British Guiana were essential for the Commonwealth war effort, since the colony’s extensive facilities for mining bauxite, the key ingredient in aluminum smelting, were Canadian owned and operated. This article examines the eventual dispatch to British Guiana of a small number of Canadian soldiers on British imperial service as a case study of wartime Anglo-Canadian military relations, addressing the nature of the Anglo-Canadian command relationship in the colony from the perspective of the Visiting Forces (British Commonwealth) Act, 1933. It explores military jurisdictional disputes in an imperial-dominion-colonial context and demonstrates the misunderstandings that arose between a Dominion seeking to preserve the national character of its overseas forces and British colonial authorities bent on simply absorbing the Canadians into British Guiana’s existing military structure.